Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Imagine, if you can, my sudden joy; imagine with what speed the nightmare fled from my thoughts, as I nestled against my extraordinary aunt's petticoats! As she re-arranged herself, to get comfortable, and one golden melon caressed my cheek! As Pia's hand sought out mine and grasped it firmly… now I discharged my duty. When my aunt's hand wrapped itself around mine, paper passed from palm to palm. I felt her stiffen, silently; then, although I snuggled up closer closer closer, she was lost to me; she was reading in the dark, and the stiffness of her body was increasing; and then suddenly I knew that I had been tricked, that Catrack was my enemy; and only the threat of policemen prevented me from telling my uncle.

(At school, the next day, I was told of Jimmy Kapadia's tragic death, suddenly at home, of a heart seizure. Is it possible to kill a human being by dreaming his death? My mother always said so; and, in that case, Jimmy Kapadia was my first murder victim. Homi Catrack was to be the next.)

When I returned from my first day back at school, having basked in the unusual sheepishness of Fat Perce and Glandy Keith ('Lissen, yaar, how did we know your finger was in the… hey, man, we got free tickets for a picture tomorrow, you want to come?') and my equally unexpected popularity ('No more Zagallo! Solid, man! You really lost your hair for something good!'), aunty Pia was out. I sat quietly with uncle Hanif while, in the kitchen, Mary Pereira prepared dinner. It was a peaceful little family scene; but the peace was shattered, abruptly, by the crash of a slamming door. Hanif dropped his pencil as Pia, having slammed the front door, flung open the living-room door with equal force. Then he boomed cheerfully, 'So, wife: what's the drama?' … But Pia was not to be defused. 'Scribble,' she said, her hand slicing air, 'Allah, don't stop for me! So much talent, a person cannot go to the pot in this house without finding your genius. Are you happy, husband? We are making much money? God is good to you?' Still Hanif remained cheerful. 'Come Pia, our little guest is here. Sit, have tea…' Actress Pia froze in an attitude of disbelief. 'O God! Such a family I have come to! My life is in ruins, and you offer tea; your mother offers petrol! All is madness…' And uncle Hanif, frowning now: 'Pia, the boy…'A shriek. 'Ahaaa! The boy-but the boy has suffered; he is suffering now; he knows what it is to lose, to feel forlorn! I, too, have been abandoned: I am great actress, and here I sit surrounded by tales of bicycle-postmen and donkey-cart drivers! What do you know of a woman's grief? Sit, sit, let some fat rich Parsee film-producer give you charity, never mind that your wife wears paste jewels and no new saris for two years; a woman's back is broad, but, beloved husband, you have made my days into deserts! Go, ignore me now, just leave me in peace to jump from the window! I will go into the bedroom now,' she concluded, 'and if you hear no more from me it is because my heart is broken and I am dead.' More doors slammed: it was a terrific exit.

Uncle Hanif broke a pencil, absent-mindedly, into two halves. He shook his head wonderingly: 'What's got into her?' But I knew. I, bearer of secrets, threatened by policemen, I knew and bit my lip. Because, trapped as I was in the crisis of the marriage of my uncle and aunt, I had broken my recently-made rule and entered Pia's head; I had seen her visit to Homi Catrack and knew that, for years now, she had been his fancy-woman; I had heard him telling her that he had tired of her charms, and there was somebody else now; and I, who would have hated him enough just for seducing my beloved aunt, found myself hating him twice as passionately for doing her the dishonour of discarding her.

'Go to her,' my uncle was saying, 'Maybe you can cheer her up.'

The boy Saleem moves through repeatedly-slammed doors to the sanctum of his tragic aunt; and enters, to find her loveliest of bodies splayed out in wondrous abandon across the marital bed-where, only last night, bodies nestled against bodies-where paper passed from hand .to hand… a hand flutters at her heart; her chest heaves; and the boy Saleem stammers, 'Aunt, О aunt, I'm sorry.'

A banshee-wail from the bed. Tragedienne's arms, flying outwards towards me. 'Hai! Hai, hai! Ai-hai-hai!' Needing no further invitation, I fly towards those arms; I fling myself between them, to lie atop my mourning aunt. The arms close around me, tightertighter, nails digging through my school-white shirt, but I don't care!-Because something has started twitching below my S-buckled belt. Aunty Pia thrashes about beneath me in her despair and I thrash with her, remembering to keep my right hand clear of the action. I hold it stiffly out above the fray. One-handed, I begin to caress her, not knowing what I'm doing, I'm only ten years old and still in shorts, but I'm crying because she's crying, and the room is full of the noise-and on the bed as two bodies thrash, two bodies begin to acquire a kind of rhythm, unnameable unthinkable, hips pushing up towards me, while she yells, 'О! О God, О God, O!' And maybe I am yelling too, I can't say, something is taking over from grief here, while my uncle snaps pencils on a striped sofa, something getting stronger, as she writhes and twists beneath me, and at last in the grip of a strength greater than my strength I am bringing down my right hand, I have forgotten my finger, and when it touches her breast, wound presses against skin…

'Yaaaouuuu!' I scream with the pain; and my aunt, snapping out of the macabre spell of those few moments, pushes me off her and delivers a resounding wallop to my face. Fortunately, it is the left cheek; there is no danger of damage to my remaining good ear. 'Badmaash!' my aunty screams, 'A family of maniacs and perverts, woeis me, what woman ever suffered so badly?'

There is a cough in the doorway. I am standing up now, shivering with pain. Pia is standing, too, her hair dripping off her head like tears. Mary Pereira is in the doorway, coughing, scarlet confusion all over her skin, holding a brown paper parcel in her hands.

'See, baba, what I have forgotten,' she finally manages to say, 'You are a big man now: look, your mother has sent you two pairs of nice, white long trousers.'

After I got so indiscreetly carried away while trying to cheer up my aunt, it became difficult foi me to remain in the apartment on Marine Drive. Long intense telephone calls were made regularly during the next few days; Hanif persuading someone, while Pia gesticulated, that perhaps now, after five weeks… and one evening after I got back from school, my mother picked me up in our old Rover, and my first exile came to an end.

Neither during our drive home, nor at any other time, was I given any explanation for my exile. I decided, therefore, that I would not make it my business to ask. I was wearing long pants now; I was, therefore, a man, and must bear my troubles accordingly. I told my mother: 'The finger is not so bad. Hanif mamu has taught me to hold the pen differently, so I can write okay.' She seemed to be concentrating very hard on the road. 'It was a nice holiday,' I added, politely. 'Thank you for sending me.'

'O child,' she burst out, 'with your face like the sun coming out, what can I tell you? Be good with your father; he is not happy these days.' I said I would try to be good; she seemed to lose control of the wheel and we passed dangerously near a bus. 'What a world,' she said after a time, 'Terrible things happen and you don't know how.'

'I know,' I agreed, 'Ayah has been telling me.' My mother looked at me fearfully, then glared at Mary in the back seat. 'You black woman,' she cried, 'what have you been saying?' I explained about Mary's stories of miraculous events, but the dire rumours seemed to calm my mother down. 'What do you know,' she sighed, 'You are only a child.'